A new round of turmoil ripped through the Daily News yesterday as mercurial owner Mort Zuckerman handed walking papers to Editor-in-Chief Kevin Convey after only a year and a half on the job.

To replace Convey, the 74-year-old Zuckerman brought in British tabloid veteran Colin Myler.

Myler, a former managing editor and executive editor at the New York Post until he left in 2007, had been editor-in-chief of the UK’s News of the World when it was closed in July and he and his staff were laid off in the wake of a phone-hacking scandal.

News of the World was owned by News Corp., as is The Post.

At the Daily News, the reaction to Myler’s appointment was “shock” and “surprise.”

Most staffers were scratching their heads about who Colin Myler is and if he would try to bring the paper more down-market.

“I don’t know anything about him other than what I read about the News of the World,” said one staffer at the Snooze.

Myler, 59, was sent into News of the World in 2007 after the hacking scandal came to light during the previous editor’s tenure.

Before coming to The Post in December 2001, Myler edited the Daily Mirror in the UK.

Inside Zuckerman’s News, the surprise was not so much that Boston Herald vet Convey was out — that had been rumored for months — but that his replacement was not Arthur Browne, the editorial page editor who has held a wide variety of top editing jobs at the paper without ever getting the top one.

For the past several months, Browne had been running the newsroom while Convey concentrated on integrating the Web and print staffs.

“I wonder if going into this Arthur knew he was only the caretaker,” said one source. “If not, it was kind of cruel.”

In fact, Browne was even running the news meeting yesterday, as he has for the past several months, as Convey arrived a bit late to the morning get-together of top editors, sources said.

No mention of the impending change was made at the meeting, the source added, but a memo was dispatched shortly after 2 p.m.

Convey was supposed to have eliminated many of the managing editor jobs as the digital and newspaper groups were being merged into a single staff.

Although Convey announced the ME changes, they were never implemented, and the masthead was never changed.

But the merger of print and Web operations rankled many veterans, who felt the digital side played up celeb gossip while ignoring city politics, crime, sports and outer-borough reporting, which has been part of the paper’s DNA since its founding.

Myler, who is expected to start on Jan. 10, will have to unite a deeply divided and demoralized newsroom. In recent months, the News has cut about two dozen newsroom staffers, including three who were handed their pink slips yesterday in addition to Convey.